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This Man Wants You to Travel the World

Has a song had a profound effect on your life? Social entrepreneur Kenji Summers can say it has.

Back in 2008, Summers heard the song "Paris Tokyo Remix" by Lupe Fiasco, Pharrell Williams, Q-Tip and Sarah Green. One of the lyrics is, "Fly to Paris, and end up in Tokyo ... Let's start a coalition so even the broke can go.” That was enough motivation for Brooklyn-born Summers to get his first passport. He then found a $350 roundtrip ticket to Barcelona and celebrated his birthday there with 10 friends.

"After that trip, I realized, 'I need to do this more. This is transformational,'" says Summers. "I realized why Pharrell said those lyrics. And it wasn’t just for me, it was for everyone, so I wanted to essentially take the world and give it back to the youth through my organization Passport Life."

Passport Life is part of a movement to help under-resourced people get passports, travel, and participate in global culture. Last year, Summers got access to a private charter through another organization and filled it with a handful of cool young people, including his friends who started streetetiquette.com, singers Jesse Boykins III and Mara Hruby, and a Passport Life fellow, Bryan Blue. Blue is a Dallas-based art director and designer from Inglewood, California, who had never been out of the country.

"We got him his passport for the trip and organized a bunch of creatives to go around and meet with him," says Summers. "We wanted the experience to show him why travel matters to his creative process, and also to his personal development." The transformative trip was documented in a web series on YouTube; the first episode is embedded below.

Passport Life, formerly Passport Project, doesn't help people sign up for their passport — that can be done online on travel.state.gov. Instead, Passport Life exists to inspire people to travel more.

"My role is to make travel more appealing to my generation because I know if it wasn’t for that song, I wouldn’t have known the importance," says Summers, who has a global entry card. "I think travel is the coolest thing you can do."

Next week, Summers is taking another fellow, this time a collegiate Poet Laureate from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on his first international trip to South Africa. Summers saw the young man perform at a Lower East Side cafe.

"I want to make him a star, I want to make these people into celebrities," says Summers. "We feed their every need, creatively. Before the trip, we orient them to where they're going. During the trip, we provide the environment for them to flourish, and then when they get back, we provide them with resources to help continue their growth."

Summers hopes these trips-of-a-lifetime will be more frequent in the near future. "I think I proved the model last year, and this year we're refining it so that we can scale this a lot more," he says. While the organization's current focus is getting American youth to travel beyond borders, Summers wants people everywhere to be more worldly. Next year, he hopes to have a Passport Life trip for a South African fellow to venture beyond his country's lines.

And to think, it all started with a song.

BONUS: Kenji Summers' Spotify Playlist

We asked Kenji to curate a Spotify playlist, which is embedded below. About the soulful playlist, Summers says:

This playlist helps me travel to a place in time where the most important elements of the music and culture were love, creativity and freedom. Because of the time period, much of the music that I curated on my playlist is rare to find outside of Spotify — and because I'm always on the the move, I like to have one place to access all of my soul favorites. One of my favorite songs on the playlist is "That's The Way of The World" by Earth, Wind & Fire; it gives me chills every time I listen because the lyrics have an enduring global message blended with incredible instrumentation. Another standout song on the playlist is "Love to the World" by L.T.D., which offers a timely note for us to consider in dealing with our global neighbors.

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